By Becky Arnold, University of Sheffield.
On the 4th and 5th of April I attended a workshop on modernising Fortran at the University of Manchester. In technological terms, Fortran is kind of a living dinosaur, like a crocodile. The difference is crocodiles have survived basically by having bigger teeth than everything around them. Fortran survived partly due to its inherent strengths, but mostly by evolving and expanding. This workshop focused on how the language has changed over time, and how to bring older Fortran code up to date.

By Becky Arnold, University of Sheffield.
On the 30th of January 2019, Christopher Woods, an EPSRC fellow at the Advanced Computing Research Centre at the University of Bristol gave a talk on "How to Design and Engineer Good Code for Research" at the University of Sheffield.

By Becky Arnold, University of Sheffield, with additional material by Rosie Higman, University of Manchester
The Turing Way is a project funded as part of UKRI’s Strategic Priorities fund. It aims to help researchers and RSEs improve the reproducibility of their research.

By Becky Arnold, University of Sheffield. On the 28th of November, Yo Yehudi of the Software Sustainability Institute and the University of Cambridge gave a half day workshop for researchers on how to contribute to open source software at the University of Sheffield.

By Becky Arnold, University of Sheffield. On the 7th of November, Raniere Silva of the Software Sustainability Institute gave a one day workshop on bash scripting at the University of Sheffield. The Unix shell has tremendous power. This workshop was geared towards researchers that had some experience of working on Unix-like systems, but wanted to build on that to better exploit its full potential. Will Furnass of the University of Sheffield Research Software Engineering group also helped out at this event.

By Becky Arnold, Software Sustainability Institute fellow. As time progresses data is getting big. This presents many scientific opportunities as well as many technical difficulties. On the 12th of September Rob Baxter of EPCC came to University of Sheffield and gave the talk “Demystifying big data, machine learning and all that” about tactics to handle this shift and advice on how to avoid pitfalls.